A random collection of roving thoughts

I’m glad to see that during my absence literally tens of people have found their way to my blog.  Today, that included people searching for “furry rape” and “Van Hool Portugal.”  Well done, sirs.

There’s a great deal I’d have liked to have written about, but I’ve been distracted by the hateful business of maintaining my hateful existence (on a level of income which I have the sneaking suspicion is far more than I need but far less than I require). So perhaps one or two notes on the past month:

1) I am greatly pleased that the loss of Martha Coakley means I won’t have to hear from Bob Menendez for awhile.  Perhaps the Senator from MTV is unaware (or perhaps it’s his counterpart from the film Casino that’s allergic to listening) but in order to motivate people to defend a majority it’s important to do something with it. This is even more important when rather than defending an actual majority you’re attempting to hold a completely arbitrary number that’s going to be fucked up by Ben Nelson anyway. (I have just quoteD from Fox News. Occasionally they do get the sense of things right.)

They'll never take our health ca-oh

It’s rather like the film Braveheart. Remember when they’re fighting at Falkirk, and the infantry are slaughtered when the noble cavalry just trot off at the crucial moment?  That was health care. Somehow it shouldn’t be hard to figure out why in the next battle the infantry won’t fall over themselves to rescue their lords and masters.

2) That having been said, I never thought 2010 was going to be as good as everybody assumed – and now I don’t think it’s going to be as bad.  Think of it what you will but our electoral system is well-insulated from popular anger. Systems matter.  So far, precious little has changed, whatever the result of a quite-inconsequential by-election.  Ask British Labour how much by-elections change.

3) On a related note I am coming, alarmingly, to think that Glenn Beck is asking the right questions. Terrible answers, to be sure. But right questions.

4) Chip Corbett sent me this article for comment.  2000 words later I’m still working on it. Suffice it to say, however, that once I got over my gentleman-and-scholar’s indignation over the death of the liberal arts I couldn’t help but laugh at the whingeing – wonderful word, no? It’s whining with a more aggressive spelling – liberal arts people who didn’t understand why nobody wanted to study them anymore. It is in fact because nobody wanted to study liberal arts in the first place but before it was necessary as part of the process of buying your way into a higher social class. (This is the point of college unless you’re already part of the upper class, in which case the point is basically gay sex.) I even had a long-winded but sadly appropriate comparison with the 19th century British officer corps. I can expound on this in conversation.

Long story short: people don’t want to study liberal arts – especially philosophy – not because their heads are filled with some airy capitalist stereotypes but because those stereotypes have never been truer than they are now. To quote scripture: physician, heal thyself.

5) I don’t care what anyone says, and I realize this is a distinctly minority opinion. But the only academy award that Inglourious Basterds will win, or deserve to, is Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz.

Incidentally, Christoph, if you’re reading this – like, I don’t want to be weird. But I think we’d be really good friends. We could get an apartment. Or something. Call me.

6) While I’m a bit disappointed that Ke$ha turned out to be white, it does make sense given her association with Flo-Rida and of course my enthusiasm is undampened. This may make me a bamma. If so, I’m fucking Obamma.

7) All joking aside, Obama is also a bamma.

8 ) It’s really too bad that there isn’t a national conference of clotheshanger manufacturers in Washington in early February.  I think it would do a lot for their collective visibility.

9) Brett Favre is really annoying when he does this:

This is not unlike the other 23 hours of his day; however it’s doubly-irritating that the song has approximately 12 words and he still fucks it up. This is not unlike another notorious fuck-up

I think the moral of the story here is get your facts right or you’ll end up being raped by a furry on a Van Hool bus to Portugal. (A suggestion which will almost certainly result in my being a target for a Keith Olbermann special comment.)  How ironic that tonight the purveyor of that violence will be Saints.

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Glenn Beck did not, in fact, rape a girl

The reference therein is to this debunked rumor, complete with a false police report, suggesting Beck committed a rape in 1990.  The linked website refutes the rumor, as does the site set up to promote it, aptly called DidGlennBeckRapeandMurderaYoungGirlin1990.com, which says that what they’re doing is an attempt to satirize tactics used by Beck himself.  Clearly, some people didn’t get it.  (Equally clearly, some people of my own ideological persuasion are just as stupid as those attracted to Glenn Beck.  Of course they’re in Adams Morgan.)

I suppose I compromise my own morals by promoting such a canard, but it is supposed to be satire and I really don’t like Glenn Beck and I really am desperate for visitors.  I think it’s about time I start believing in a moral system which simply takes the aggregate of lots of different motivations and adds the value together in a fairly random spastic way which reconfirms what I wanted to do in the first place.  Does such a thing exist?

Ethics is fun.

Props by the way to Andrew Fogle.  (Who of course was in Adams Morgan.)  Ironically this is at once the most comprehensible and most false communication I’ve ever had with you.

I am increasingly fond of Shepard Smith

Through a roundabout circuit – online mind drift, if you like – that took me from a friend’s pictures of Sweden to an expatriate Facebook group to a blog that included a Daily Show clip responding to the whole Fox News “road to socialism” meme which apparently excoriated Obama and Democrats with such zingers as, “Do you want America to become Sweden?” (Answer: yes.)  In the event included in that post was a Glenn Beck blubberthon about America’s socialist future which led me sadomasochistically to run a YouTube search on him in the effort to get my blood up.

And then I found this:

This is not the first video I’ve seen of Shepard Smith that I’ve appreciated.  The first was when he accidentally talked about giving Jennifer Lopez a blow job.  I remember him recovering gracefully, which is always a plus in my book.  And then, of course, the torture remarks.  On the one hand, you can fault a journalist for failing to maintain not objectivity – a goal which is as misguided and perverse as it is dangerous – but his coolness when discussing a subject.  But then the segment wasn’t journalistic, it was a discussion based on opinion, and I find it heartening that someone on cable news – not merely on Fox News – can be so passionate about the subject.

But these comments on Glenn Beck, which had another Fox personality whose name escapes me excoriating him on the air, were phenomenal.  Highlights:

Behind our building, there’s a big jib camera, there are people standing in line waiting for whatever this thing is – I bet they’re serving food.  They might have food.

[…] There’s an enormous event happening here in an hour, and I can’t wait, and if people want to – think I’m a hater because of that, then… *blubbers*

[…] We are here to celebrate, worship and adore.  We have the twelve principles and the nine things and the fear chamber and the whole darn thing!

Now I know I’m seeing this several months late.  But then I don’t control the speed at which things reach me, and I like what I like.  And these days, I like Shep Smith.